'To what extent is the US experience in Iraq comparable to
their experience in Vietnam?'

Surely the most
delicious irony of the long-running mess in Iraq is that one of its principal
architects was also one of the first to call it a ‘quagmire’—generally accepted
code for declaring that it is a debacle on the scale of the Vietnam war. In
1994, Dick Cheney argued that the G.H.W. Bush administration (in which he
served as defence secretary) was correct not to pursue Saddam Hussein to
Baghdad.‘[I]it’s a quagmire, if you do
that’, Cheney said, and in quick strokes laid out many of the problems that
actually did follow upon the 2003 invasion.[1]

By the time of that invasion, Cheney
was vice-president to George W. Bush, and the defence secretary was Donald
Rumsfeld, who came into office determined to ‘transform’ the US military and
assert civilian control over the generals. ‘Rumsfeld’s meddling approach’,
argues Michael Desch, ‘contributed in significant measure to the [subsequent]
problems in Iraq and elsewhere.’ The micromanagement extended even to ‘the
number of troops required and the phasing of their deployments.’[2]—words
strikingly reminiscent of the Kennedy-Johnson defence secretary from 1961 to
1968. Robert McNamara similarly micromanaged the military, even to the extent
of decreeing that the army and navy adopt the same nomenclature for their
aircraft. (Supposedly he couldn’t fathom the traditional designations.) A US
Army study termed his years ‘The McNamara Revolution’, as if prefiguring Don
Rumsfeld’s 21st century Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Wrote the army
historian: ‘What was unique was the rapidity with which [McNamara]
absorbed information and made decisions’[3]—words
that could have been applied equally to Rumsfeld.

It
was much the same with the decision to go to war. Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) and
George W. Bush (GWB) both brought personal baggage to the Oval Office: LBJ’s
freedom of action was limited by the national adulation for the martyred
President Kennedy, who had invested 16,000 US advisors and 200 combat deaths in
the survival of the Saigon regime; GWB had the memory of his father’s failure
to chase Saddam Hussein to Baghdad, only to become the target of an evident
Saddam assassination attempt. And both presidents favoured a management model
of leading from the top, emphasizing ‘inspiration and guidance from above and
loyalty and compliance from below’.[4]

The Nixon administration changed
course in Vietnam by building up the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and
reducing the American role. ‘Vietnamization’ led in four years to the
withdrawal of US combat troops—and in six years to a North Vietnamese invasion
across the 17th Parallel. Today, the Bush administration is equally determined
to build up the Iraqi army and police in hopes of extricating American forces,
and his successor is likely to continue or speed that withdrawal. Even the
rhetoric is the same. Nixon: ‘as the South Vietnamese forces become stronger,
the rate of American withdrawal can become greater’. Bush: ‘as the Iraqi
security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down’.[5]

In the case of Vietnam, the result
was disaster for the Saigon regime, humiliation for the US, and a sharp
curtailment of president powers. In the words of William Howell and Jon Pevehouse:

As the Vietnam War dragged on and casualties
mounted, Congress and the public grew increasingly wary of the conflict and of
the power delegated to the president in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution. In
1970 … Congress formally repealed that resolution. And over the next several
years, legislators enacted a series of appropriations bills intended to
restrict the war's scope and duration. Then, in June 1973, after the Paris
peace accords had been signed, Congress enacted a supplemental appropriations
act that cut off all funding for additional military involvement in Southeast
Asia…. Finally, when South Vietnam fell in 1975,
Congress took the extraordinary step of formally forbidding U.S. troops from
enforcing the Paris peace accords, despite the opposition of President Gerald
Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.[6]

A
similar path is being followed by many Congressional Democrats today, including
the party’s contending candidates for president. As the conservative editorial
writer Daniel Henninger observes of the recent Iraqi government setbacks, ‘It
was hard not to miss the antiwar spin coming off reports of the fighting’, in
the evident hope that Basra might prove to be the Tet Offensive of the Iraq
war. ‘An historic line … runs from South Vietnam to Baghdad.’[7]
Marilyn Young, in her extended screech against the war, would agree:

Vietnam haunts the war in Iraq … because it has begun to smell like defeat
but more significantly … because the task the US has taken upon itself is
similar: to bend a country about which it knows little, whose language and
history are unknown to its soldiers, to its will.[8]

This would seem to complete the
analogy of Vietnam to Iraq, while begging the question of whether within a few
years helicopters will have to extricate the remaining US personnel from the
roof of the embassy in Baghdad, as in the iconic footage of the fall of Saigon
in April 1975. (Even serious historians present that evacuation as a military
defeat, though the last American warfighter had left the country two years
before: ‘the ignominious, catastrophic, confused retreat off the rooftops of US
buildings in Saigon’ is how David Ryan remembers it.[9])
How much truth is there in this persistent analogy?